I have been pondering over data, privacy and all the scandals surrounding Facebook, Google, Amazon and the other tech giants. We all know they’re collecting vast amounts of information about us and using their monopolistic powers to pervert markets and lay waste whole industries at their whim.

However, this piece is not about them. It is about us. What’s wrong with us? We’re contained inside surveillance capitalism, yet we seem perfectly content to carry on. I read the other day that Facebook posted record profits despite ALL the stuff that’s been going on with them in 2018. Don’t we care at all? Maybe.

Maybe we just don’t know how to. Maybe Adam Curtis is right. Maybe the world feels too complex and chaotic. He uses the word “HyperNormalisation” — a phrase coined by a Russian historian writing about the last years of the Soviet Union. In the 80s everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew that it wasn’t working. They knew it was corrupt, knew that the bosses were looting the system, knew that the politicians had no alternative vision. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakery as normal.

Sometimes this is exactly what the modern tech and media landscape feels like to me. We know it’s not working for us, we know we’re being treated as commodities in a state of perfect paralysis — yet we keep on checking Instagram and binging Netflix or YouTube.

Escaping the surveillance economy doesn’t feel like an actual option to most people.

So are we simply lost in a giant digital coliseum, housing billions of people that can get any kind of entertainment they like, 24/7? What can we do to break out?

A friend once mentioned that every superhero has a kryptonite — their super power always has a fatal flaw. So what is the flaw in Google and Facebook’s near-perfect algorithms and data collection capabilities?

Data itself, of course.

Their super power is also their greatest weakness. It relies on automated data gathering and processing at an almost incomprehensible scale. To quote Adam Curtis himself:

Using feedback loops, pattern matching and pattern recognition, those systems can understand us quite simply. That we are far more similar to each other than we might think, that my desire for an iPhone as a way of expressing my identity is mirrored by millions of other people who feel exactly the same. We’re not actually that individualistic. We’re very similar to each other and computers know that dirty secret. But because we feel like we’re in control when we hold the magic screen, it allows us to feel like we’re still individuals. And that’s a wonderful way of managing the world.

However, all of this power relies on the idea that the data can be trusted. What if we all passively, at a large scale, began to generate data that looked and felt real? Data that was generated by us — but created sarcastically. Fake, but real. What better way to show your human objection to constant data gathering. Let’s call it digital activism.

I think we are seeing signs of it already. For example, while gathering thoughts for this piece I came across the Parasite.

Bjørn Karmann and Tore Knudsen recently created Project Alias, a teachable “parasite” that is designed to give users more control over their smart assistants, both when it comes to customisation and privacy.

It sits on your Amazon Echo or Google Home and lets you block them and control them in various ways.

I then found Noiszy. Their tagline is brilliant.

Noiszy is a browser plugin that creates meaningless web data — digital noise. It visits and navigates around websites, from within your browser, leaving misleading digital footprints around the internet. It obscures you, but if enough people did it, could it actually turn Google or Facebook’s greatest asset into a giant liability.

What if more than 51% of the data they received was nonsense generated by humans in their own name? Would it break the code and implode the universe?

Activism like this is good (and fun).

It is also serious business. Maybe, if enough of us did it, it would actually create change. Facebook, Google and Amazon all relies on this data. They sell the very same data that we’re talking about obscuring. Maybe we could expose the fakeness with the same clicks, likes and shares that they crave.

We could also use these techniques for our own personal good. A friend of mine keeps two YouTube accounts. One of them is only used for Ted talks, stuff for work and other things that represents his best self. On the other one he watches football highlights, music, gaming and other entertainment. But he won’t let that “pollute” his other account because then it instantly takes over. Being in the world of recommender systems that made me think.

If we can build systems to obscure data, we can also build bots that can train these algorithms to show us more of what we’d like, not what we do. Until my YouTube account has an “exploration” setting I can switch on, I might employ a bot to be more aspirational on my behalf — so to speak. If left to themselves, these algorithms maximize engagement and time spent, but is that really what we want?

Until this utopian future occurs, maybe we have to employ a bot to make sure our YouTube and Instagram feed stays balanced, even if that content is not always our first impulsive choice. Maybe if we hid our worst tendencies from ourselves, then actually putting the device down would also be a wee bit easier?

I’d pay 3.99 a month for that.

Bibblio boosts engagement and revenue by suggesting the best content to your users from across your site. Visit us or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Originally published at bibblio.org.

On 26 September, Bibblio hosted the second edition of the Future of Media and Publishing meetup at Impact Hub in Berlin. As part of the evening we had a panel on audience acquisition and diversification featuring a trio of audience development executives, which enabled a really informative deep dive on the subject. So deep in fact, that there was too much for one blog post! This is Part II, and you can check out Part I here. Let’s dive straight back in.

Syndication and cross-pollination?

With the disclaimer that it’s an area that Bibblio is exploring, Mads brought up the subject of syndication and cross-pollination in digital; i.e. working with other content businesses to cross-post content or share each other’s content on social. On Instagram and YouTube content creators do this a lot: they’ll appear in each other’s posts or videos and try to share audiences with one another. Media companies are beginning to pursue this route too: PopSugar in New York has a whole team focusing on making partnerships with other publishers and individuals. Business Insider is another good example. It’s common for them to contact a smaller publisher and offer to post one of their articles on Business Insider, but with a link back to the original article. The idea is that they get good content for free, and the publisher gets extended reach.

Emily said that Highsnobiety do have a network of partner publishers, although it’s relatively small. Business Insider was actually syndicating their content, but they haven’t seen much of an improvement in traffic (something that we’ve heard other publishers comment on). For Emily it’s a cool idea to be able to leverage the power of a much bigger brand than Highsnobiety, but they’re just not seeing results in terms of referral traffic.

What has really worked, though, is when bigger brands pick up their video content. They created a documentary on the huge culture around fake clothing in Russia, and Business of Fashion picked it up. It massively extended their reach, and the video ended up getting a million views just from Business of Fashion. So syndication in that way is great for the brand and their videos and podcasts, but it doesn’t drive much revenue from referral traffic. In response to a question about how Business of Fashion picked up the video, Emily said that she just reached out to them and suggested that they feature it.

Mads mentioned that Bibblio actually happens to work with Business of Fashion too, and it seems to him that they’ve embraced the idea of syndication. As well as featuring content from Highsnobiety, in the way Emily described, they now have an offering called Daily, where their editors will find five or six stories from other publishers and just link to them in one place on Business of Fashion. The idea is that if you find the most interesting content there then you’ll come back, regardless of where it originated. They’re prepared to let the original publisher have the traffic, because they win too by becoming a source of interesting content.

Working with influencers?

Mads next question was whether any of the panel had tried to organize a similar syndication arrangement with a social media influencer?

Deana said that Handelsblatt have their own take on the formula — they work a lot with famous German politicians and business personalities who write articles as contributors for the website. This helps the individual to get publicity at the same time as creating interesting content for Handelsblatt. These sorts of pieces are one of their biggest traffic sources. They do retain some control over the editorial to ensure that the content is suitable for the site.

Mads was interested in this point because City AM in London, a popular daily commuter paper aimed at the City of London, recently opened up a commercial product where, for a fee, you can get your own editorial pass and publish content to the website without the constraints of it going through City AM’s editorial team.

Tourists and locals?

Mads mentioned the idea of tourists and locals — people who click through to your site from e.g. a social channel as opposed to people who spend time there maybe every day. He asked whether the panelists knew whether there was a difference in the revenue generated by returning visitors vs a visitor they might only see once, or very infrequently?

Emily said that it was hard to say for Highsnobiety, because most of their revenue comes from branded content. From a revenue point of view, it doesn’t really matter if it’s someone new or someone loyal that’s looking at the content. She said that that doesn’t seem to be the case with ecommerce though. They know a few publishers that are really successful with e-commerce, both affiliate and own products, and the learning from talking to them is that the loyal audience is responsible for a huge part of their revenue.

Mads said that that reflected what he’d heard at Bibblio as well there seems to be a Pareto distribution where about 20 percent of visitors generate about 80 percent of revenue (although that’s obviously a bit of a generalization).

Mads added that that publishers are increasingly trying to exploit the potential value of these visitors. Daily Mail group now has a group of 18 staff who are dedicated affiliate writers — they only write content for the purpose of affiliate sales. He acknowledged that not all publishers will feel comfortable with this approach, but in many places it’s now almost part of the normal editorial process to include commercial elements with copy.

Publishers need to learn from ecommerce?

He suggested that maybe this is just an evolution of what publishers have always been doing: writing about products and things in the world and making people want them. Isn’t it only fair that publishers start to try and take a bigger share of that revenue, if that’s the value they’ve always created? Rather than just running banner ads and giving the users to e-commerce sites which makes all the money. Acknowledging that he was being deliberately provocative, Mads asked whether publishers should think of themselves, in some sense, as ecommerce platforms too?

Christian agreed, saying that if publishers want to survive they have to face up to the reality of the new commercial landscape. Funke Digital has ticket shops for e.g. concerts, merchandise, and of course newspapers and books. They even have dating.

Deana said that it’s hard for Handelsblatt to take this approach, since they have one unified, journalistic site. They have a hard paywall: all their content is behind it and you have to pay. You can’t ask users who have paid to access that content to read affiliate content. Handelsblatt would need a separate site for that sort of content. Deana agreed that on a free site affiliate content is fine, and that the audience are probably aware that that’s part of the deal when they get it for free.

Christian added that publishers had realized that they needed to radically change their commercial models, because banners and other forms of ads weren’t generating enough revenue. In Germany a lot of publishers are switching to the subscription model.

Subscription and what else?

Mads next question was on the topic of subscription and premium products. A lot of what the publishing industry has done up until now in response to the need to find other channels for revenue is to bring in paywalls. Sometimes you can view a few bits of content before you need to pay, and some are like Handelsblatt and you have to pay straight away. Mads wanted to see what the panel thought about another approach. Should publishers think more in terms of membership, where content is free, but you get additional benefits if you pay to be part of the club? What could those things be? Perhaps better personalization, or access to events?

Deana was very positive about events. She thinks that we have to stop trying to reach as many people as possible, and more about how to find great content for a specific audience. If you do that, people will be loyal to your brand. Good events and other exclusive perks help people to really identify themselves with your brand. Handelsblatt are trying to do a lot of events which are very exclusive and only aimed at certain groups of people.

For the final point, Mads was curious what the panel thought about personalization. He told the story of Foodora, who had built a recommendation engine for their food delivery website to make restaurant suggestions to their users. When they implemented it, they got lots of angry feedback. The engine was recommending McDonalds and other chain restaurants a lot, and people weren’t happy. Foodora quickly discovered that this wasn’t the system malfunctioning. The system was suggesting the chains because they were popular choices that got good ratings. The trouble was, that a lot of people on Foodora didn’t want to be the ‘McDonalds person’, at least not when they were on Foodora. They didn’t want to have it suggested to them, to be labelled in that way, even if they sometimes bought McDonalds through Foodora.

Mads suggested that maybe the lesson for publishers from this was that they should still try to appeal to the people that we would like to be, and not just the people that we are. Algorithmic personalization can trap people in narrow silos. In a world where all these other platforms, Facebook, Google etc., are personalized to us, should publishers try to do something different — something more aspirational? Is that, in the end, what people want to pay for?

Emily had a very interesting story in response. As affiliate sales became a bigger part of Highsnobiety’s business, their strategy changed. They used to cover a lot of niche Japanese streetwear brands that you can’t buy in Germany, which meant they weren’t making any affiliate revenue from those stories. So the strategy changed so that content would emphasise products that people could actually buy from the site. The result of that was lots of complaints that the site was becoming too mainstream, so they listened to their audience and returned to their more niche content.

Emily said that, in the short run, it would have been helpful for them to continue with the more mainstream content: pop culture content is easier to monetize right away. But it doesn’t appeal to the audience that they really want. So growth is a bit slower when they don’t feature ‘click bait’, but in the long run the real value is in maintaining a great brand, which means not succumbing to the lowest common denominator.

Mads sympathized, pointing out that the Facebook publishers who really optimized click-baity content were the publishers who’ve been hit the hardest by far by the changes to the algorithm. Maybe there was never a shortcut to building a great publishing business.

That’s all from the second Future of Media and Publishing meetup from Berlin — join our group here to be there for the next event!

Bibblio boosts engagement and revenue by suggesting the best content to your users from across your site. Visit us or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

How can digital media and publishing diversify audience acquisition? Part II was originally published in The Graph on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On 26 September, Bibblio hosted the second edition of the Future of Media and Publishing meetup at Impact Hub in Berlin. As part of the evening we had a panel on audience acquisition and diversification featuring a trio of audience development executives, which enabled a really informative deep dive on the subject. So deep in fact, that there was too much for one blog post! So this is Part I, with Part II to follow.

Growth or diversity? Both?

Moderating the panel was Bibblio co-founder and CEO, Mads Holmen, and he set the scene by talking about the world publishers currently inhabit. Ten years ago, 80 percent of visitors to websites came directly: now, about 80 percent of the traffic comes from Google and Facebook. With this in mind, Mads asked the panel how important is pure audience growth versus audience diversification: i.e. is the focus just on growing page views and audience numbers, or is it on finding traffic from sources other than Google and social?

Deana Mrkaja (Senior Audience Development Manager at Handelsblatt) began by noting that Handelsblatt is quite an unusual case. Handelsblatt’s audience is very loyal on the whole, so they’re less concerned about visitors being ‘tourists’ from social who will bounce after viewing one page. Their social traffic is actually very small — only a few percent, and often single digits. 20–30 percent is a pretty common figure she hears from other publishers.

Diversification is still important though, and they’re focusing on opening new channels, like Instagram. However, because of the nature of the content — hard news, often about finance and economics — LinkedIn and Xing are very important to them. Her final comment was that growth is clearly crucial, but diversification is increasingly important.

Christian Pieper (Head of Audience Development at Funke Digital) said that, these days, diversification is essential if media companies want to grow. You need to know all the sources that your audience are coming from, and how they’re behaving. Data’s not a magic bullet though — over the last few years Funke Digital has tried to identify the ‘perfect user’ for targeting purposes, and discovered that they don’t actually exist. Depending on the different user profile, they have to create different approaches and content for different platforms.

Emily Dreesen (Head of Audience Development at Highsnobiety) agreed with Christian. She said that at Highsnobiety there was particular pressure to diversify for further growth because of the decline of Facebook traffic. As well as looking to new sources for traffic, they’re looking to improve acquisition from Google, which was easier than Facebook. They’re also focusing on the most valuable users, which for them is direct traffic. Direct is also the the hardest thing to grow. The most important element in growing direct traffic is the brand, which is also what advertisers care about the most, so developing the brand is the top priority.

How important is direct traffic?

Mads followed up by asking how much of the panelists traffic is direct at the moment, and is that measured in the company as a KPI?

Emily said that direct traffic to Highsnobiety, especially on mobile, is quite low — single digits. That’s to be expected in the lifestyle field, because most people discover content from Facebook or Google. On desktop it’s a bit higher, in the region of 10–15 percent. It’s going to become increasingly important as they look to diversify their revenue. They’re moving much more into ecommerce, and they see that the direct, super loyal users convert the best, so increasing direct visits is a top KPI.

Christian said that for Funke Digital 40 percent of traffic is direct — the difference with Highsnobiety is to be expected because of the news category vs lifestyle. He agreed with Emily that most of the time direct traffic is coming from desktop: nobody who’s using a smartphone is typing morgenpost.de into the address bar, they’re using Google News and other channels.

Which sources are providing growth?

Mads asked for a quick run down of which traffic sources had been going up and which sources had been going down?

Deana said that LinkedIn and Xing were particularly effective for them because of their niche: Handelsblatt is only really about economics and politics in Germany, so people who type in Handelsblatt.com know what they’re going to get. Xing and LinkedIn are more important than Facebook and Instagram because they’re platforms suited to the topics Handelsblatt covers.

She added that people coming to their pages are often over 60 years old, so it’s not the classic Instagram demographic. They’re trying to change that though. They’re looking to reach out to younger people and find new ways to translate their content into different channels to broaden its appeal. One place they’re trying to do that is on Instagram.

Curating content?

The panel were asked about whether they curate content for certain groups, e.g. young professionals in Handelsblatt’s case?

Deana said that Handelsblatt’s approach, which is one that a lot of other German media are taking too at the moment, is creating ‘clubs’ or running monthly events for specific audience groups. It’s not about reaching millions of people, but gathering the people around you who will really stay loyal and be interested in the content that you’re creating. This is how you increase loyalty to your brand — by providing your audience with really targeted, relevant content.

Christian was in full agreement. He suggested that everyone was talking about the impact of data, but that to get the most out of it you have to really dig into your data to look at what interests people, and try new things on new traffic sources. He makes sure that he knows which story angles and pictures are working for different user groups: the story behind the image on Instagram is the same as the story behind the headline on their web site which interests the direct user who has been coming for ten years. You need to find the right angle for each audience.

Channel optimization?

Mads asked about the process of repackaging the content for different channels. Were the panelists using any technology to do that, or are they doing what they’ve always done, but now they’re just having to do it in ten channels?

Emily said that tried some optimization tools, e.g. translating text content into video content, but in the end they saw more success by just having a dedicated editor for each platform. Facebook pushed their Facebook Watch video platform, so they had to hire a team for that. They’re now on Snapchat Discover so they’ll need to hire a team for that. In the end you still need staff for every platform — technology can’t solve that.

Deana said that technology had had more of an impact for them. They’re using different tools for different channels, e.g. Echobox for Twitter and also for Facebook, which makes their lives much easier. E.g. with Echobox you put social media posts in the queue and it will decide when the right time to post something is. This means you have more time to do other things. But, as Emily said, you still need editors for everything, and to get the most from the tools you need to use people who really understand what they’re doing. Christian echoed Deana’s thoughts. Software has more and more of a role, but it’s not bringing in automation per se.

Editors as social media stars?

Mads brought up a previous Future of Media and Publishing meetup in New York, where PopSugar and Conde Nast had talked about encouraging their own editors and journalists to build their own followings on social. The panelists acknowledged that that was something that they were doing too, so Mads asked how do they deal with those editors and journalists becoming famous in their own right? Is there a fear that in some ways they’re using their brand to make them more powerful? How do they manage that internally?

Emily said that a lot of Highsnobiety’s editors are really big on Instagram: one of them has 40000 followers. That person used to work freelance and then they owned the brand partnerships themselves. Now it always needs to be clear what’s private and what’s related to Highsnobiety. Editors can publish what they’d like privately, but they can’t take money from brands.

Also, if the editorial team is in touch with brands that the branded content team are about to close big deals with, the editorial team have to be very careful that they don’t just give the brand the content for free. Their editorial content is often very product focused, and they need e.g. posts on the new Nike sneakers because that’s what the audience wants, so they have to work very closely with the branded team to make sure that they don’t cannibalize their deals.

That’s it for Part I — keep your eyes out for Part II, coming soon!

Bibblio boosts engagement and revenue by suggesting the best content to your users from across your site. Visit us or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Originally published at www.bibblio.org.

How can digital media and publishing diversify audience acquisition? Part I was originally published in The Graph on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As early as mid-November, the way that you create content with your WordPress site is going to drastically change with the release of WordPress 5.0.

The focus of this major release is the WordPress Gutenberg Editor, which is a complete relaunch of the current text editor that you use to create posts and pages.

It’s not just a redesign — Gutenberg will change your WordPress content creation experience at a fundamental level, which is why it’s essential that you understand how Gutenberg works to avoid any interruptions to your WordPress workflows.

While Gutenberg will require some adjustment in the short-term, the long-term effect is that you’ll gain the ability to create more engaging content for your readers. As creators of an engagement-boosting related content tool, that’s definitely something we can get behind!

To help make the transition to Gutenberg as painless as possible for you, we created this comprehensive WordPress Gutenberg Editor guide.

First, we’ll share a brief introduction to how the WordPress Gutenberg Editor works and what it’s changing. Then, we’ll show you hands-on how you can effectively use Gutenberg to create content.

What’s different about the WordPress Gutenberg editor?

The biggest change with Gutenberg is its new block-based editing approach. To explain block-based editing, let’s first take things back to the current text editor.

The current text editor is a lot like a Microsoft Word document. It’s one single unified field where you add your text, images, and any other content. You have one toolbar at the top, and that’s where you do all of your formatting.

Here’s what the introduction to this post looks like in the current WordPress Editor:

Gutenberg changes this approach by separating every element in your post into its own block (sort of like the Medium editor).

Now, each paragraph is its own block, each image is its own block, each video is its own block…you get the idea.

Similarly, as third-party developers start adding Gutenberg compatibility, content from your plugins will also get its own block. For example, our roadmap includes a dedicated Bibblio Gutenberg block that will let you insert related posts from Bibblio as their own block.

So what does Gutenberg look like with separate blocks? Here’s what that same content looks like in Gutenberg:

If you want to experience this block-based approach in action, you can use the live Gutenberg demo at WordPress.org.

What are the benefits of Gutenberg and block-based editing?

So why is using blocks like this better? Well, there are a few ways in which this new block-based approach is going to unlock new functionality for you:

• A more visual experience. While editing, you’ll be able to see how blocks will actually look to your visitors, which offers a much more visual design experience.
• Easier to work with plugin output. Rather than using shortcodes to insert plugin content, plugin developers will be able to create their own visual blocks that you can use in your designs.
• More layout and content flexibility. Gutenberg includes blocks that let you add new content (like a button) or create more complicated layouts (like columns) without the need for any custom HTML.

Finally, on a more technical level, the Gutenberg Editor is built with React. This will allow third-party WordPress developers to use more modern technologies, which the current text editor doesn’t allow for.

Rapid-fire rundown of important Gutenberg facts

• Gutenberg is scheduled to be released as part of WordPress 5.0 around November 19th, 2018, but that could be pushed back as late as January 2019 depending on how the testing goes.
• Gutenberg will work with any WordPress theme, but theme developers can add special compatibility for things like block styling and full-width image alignments, so you will see the term “Gutenberg-compatible theme” marketed soon.
• All your existing content will use Gutenberg as well, but in a special way. We’ll show you how it works at the end of this post.
• Third-party plugin developers will be able to add their own blocks to the Gutenberg interface.
• You don’t have to use the Gutenberg editor. While it will replace the current text editor in WordPress 5.0, you can disable it by using the official Classic Editor plugin.

WordPress Gutenberg Editor tutorial: How to use the new editor

Now that you know what the WordPress Gutenberg Editor is, how can you actually use it to create content?

The goal of this section is to give you the knowledge that you need to keep creating great content once WordPress 5.0 launches.

Explaining the Gutenberg interface

Here’s a quick summary of the most important parts of the Gutenberg Editor interface:

• A — these two buttons let you add new blocks.
• B — this is the body of the editor.
• C — this sidebar lets you control overall document settings, as well as settings for individual blocks.

Adding content (blocks) to Gutenberg

Adding text content to Gutenberg is simple — you just click and type like you would in the current editor.

The only difference here is that each time you hit Enter, Gutenberg will create a new paragraph block:

If you’d like to insert something other than a paragraph, you can use one of the two + icons.

Clicking those icons will open up an accordion interface where you can browse all the available blocks (you can also search for blocks by name):

Once you insert a block, you’ll interact with it in the editing interface, as well as the sidebar. For example, if you insert an image block, you’ll be able to access your WordPress Media Library to insert images. And then once you’ve inserted an image, you can add alt text and modify other settings in the sidebar:

Similarly, if you add a button, you can click and type to add the button text and then configure colors in the sidebar:

Finally, not all blocks offer sidebar options. For example, the YouTube block just has you paste in a URL and that’s it:

Rearranging content in Gutenberg

In the current WordPress editor, you do all your (re)arranging with cut and paste. While Gutenberg still lets you use cut and paste, you also get a few new options.

When you hover over any block, you’ll see two arrows, as well as six dots, on the left side:

To move the block up or down one spot, you can just click the up or down arrow.

Alternatively, you can also use drag-and-drop to move blocks by clicking on the six dots and dragging the block to its new spot:

Finally, you can also rearrange blocks into different layouts. If you add the Columns block, you’ll be able to insert new blocks inside each column or drag existing blocks into the column layout:

Configure backend post settings, like categories, SEO, etc.

There’s a lot more to creating WordPress content than just the content…

By that, I mean you have a lot of backend “stuff” that you need to configure for each post:

• Categories and tags
• URL slugs
• Featured images
• SEO settings
• Social media settings
• Whether or not to include a post in Bibblio’s related content suggestions
• …you get the idea!

Don’t worry — you’ll still be able to control all of that with Gutenberg.

For most of the core WordPress settings, you can use the Document tab of the Gutenberg sidebar:

The only thing missing is your content’s URL slug, which you can set by clicking on the title:

As for settings that you use a plugin for, that will depend on the plugin.

Some plugins — like Yoast SEO — have already added Gutenberg compatibility. So if you’re one of the millions of webmasters who use Yoast SEO, you’ll be able to configure your site’s SEO from that same Document sidebar:

For other plugins, you’ll still be able to use meta boxes like you can with the current WordPress editor. For example, here’s what it looks like to add a review box using MyThemeShop’s popular WP Review Pro plugin:

Each meta box gets its own accordion tab, which helps declutter the interface.

Five tips for working more productively with Gutenberg

From the tutorial above, you might’ve noticed that using Gutenberg involves a lot more mouse clicks than the current WordPress editor. That might seem like an odd thing to point out, but it’s important because it can slow down your content creation process.

It doesn’t have to be like that, though.

Once you’ve mastered how Gutenberg works at a basic level, there are a number of techniques that you can implement to work more productively with Gutenberg.

Here are some of the most helpful shortcuts and tips…

1. Use slash “/” to add new blocks more quickly

Rather than clicking the + icon every time you want to add a new block, you can insert blocks more quickly by typing “/” in an empty block.

After the “/”, start typing the name of the block that you want to insert. Gutenberg will automatically suggest blocks that match, and then you just need to hit Enter to insert the block:

2. Drag images into Gutenberg from your desktop

Rather than manually adding an image block every time you want to insert an image, you can save time by dragging images straight from your desktop into the Gutenberg interface. Gutenberg will automatically upload them to your WordPress Media Library and insert them at the proper spot (that second part is what saves the most time!):

Just make sure you see the blue line — otherwise, the upload won’t work.

3. Use Gutenberg keyboard shortcuts or markdown

Beyond working with generic keyboard shortcuts (e.g. Ctrl + I for italics), Gutenberg comes with its own special keyboard shortcuts, as well as some support for markdown syntax.

To view a full list of keyboard shortcuts, use the Shift + Alt + H shortcut:

And here’s some of the markdown syntax that you can use:

• ## to insert headers (## is H2, ### is H3, etc.). This will automatically create a Header block.
• > to insert a quote. This will automatically create a quote block.
• * to start an unordered list.
• 1. To start an ordered list.

4. Explore the different editor modes (like using a unified toolbar)

Gutenberg offers a number of different modes that you might prefer to the default experience:

• Unified Toolbar — fixes the formatting toolbar to the top of the interface.
• Full-Screen — hides the WordPress dashboard sidebar to give you a true full-screen editing experience.
• Spotlight — fades out all blocks except the block that you’re currently working on.

You can enable them by clicking on the three dots icon in the top-right corner. For example, here’s what the Unified Toolbar mode looks like:

You can use multiple modes at the same time. And you can also switch to code editing mode from this same drop-down.

5. Use Gutenberg plugins to add helpful new functionality

Just like WordPress as a whole, the Gutenberg Editor is built to be highly extensible, and developers are already hard at work building extensions that add functionality to Gutenberg.

This new functionality comes in a few forms.

First, as you already learned, many developers are adding new blocks for their existing plugins, and we have our own plans to create a Bibblio block for our WordPress related posts plugin.

But beyond that, developers are also creating new plugins that are exclusively focused on Gutenberg. These plugins can help you add both content blocks (pricing tables, testimonials, etc.) and layout blocks (more flexible column structures, etc.). Some good examples to start you off are:

Here’s what will happen to all your old content once WordPress 5.0 is released

Now that you have a good understanding of how the WordPress Gutenberg Editor works, let’s end with a quick look at what’s going to happen to all of your existing content once WordPress 5.0 is released.

Here’s a simple test post in the current WordPress editor:

And here’s what it looks like after activating Gutenberg:

Notice how it’s all in one single Classic block, rather than separate blocks? This is done to ensure that the shift to Gutenberg doesn’t cause issues with your existing content.

You can still interact with your content in the Classic block just like you would in the current editor. For example, you even get the same TinyMCE toolbar:

And if you do want to move your old content to Gutenberg, you just need to click the three dots icon and choose Convert to Blocks. Gutenberg will then automatically break up your existing content into blocks and you’ll be able to interact with it like any other Gutenberg post:

And that should be all you need to get up and running once WordPress 5.0 is released in November (or maybe January…)

And remember — if you’re already using Bibblio’s recommendations on your site, our modules are compatible with the new editor. And if you’re not, learn how Bibblio can help you display better related content on your WordPress site.

Bibblio boosts engagement and revenue by suggesting the best content to your users from across your site. Visit us or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Originally published at www.bibblio.org.

Your guide to the brand new WordPress Gutenberg Editor was originally published in The Graph on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Where are forward thinking publishers looking for sustainable audience growth and revenue?

On 20 September, Bibblio and our friends at Sovrn brought the Future of Media and Publishing meetup back to New York City, getting together a group of future-oriented publishers to discuss how the industry is changing and what they’re doing to adapt. We covered so much ground that we split the write-up of the evening into three parts. The first section features our speaker, Guy LeCharles Gonzalez (Publisher at Writer’s Digest and Director of marketing at F+W Media). Last week we had Part I of the panel discussion, featuring Carey Polis (Digital Director from Bon Appetit), Joe LaFalce (VP, Business Development at POPSUGAR) and Daniel Stedman (CEO & Co-Founder of Brooklyn Magazine and Northside Media), and here’s the final set of insights from the evening.

Who’s calling the shots?

Jumping back into the action, Carey had been discussing how it was important to make sure that the editors that they asked to support affiliate promotions were enthusiastic about the products involved. More broadly, Carey said that they don’t try to control their editors when it comes to what they put out e.g. on Instagram, but they encourage them to post Bon Appétit content, and they’d step in if they posted something out of line.

Mads noted that now individuals / editors are becoming stars. In the past, everyone new National Geographic but didn’t know who was taking the pictures, but now that’s switching around, and in some cases people know the individual rather than the brand they work for. He speculated that publishers and media might need to find creative ways to work with talent in the future as the relationship between employer and employee changes.

Leaving money on the historical table?

Mads moved on to suggest that publishers had historically sold the value they created short — only putting ads next to content when all these other opportunities existed. He asked the panel what they thought about that idea.

Carey agreed, but said that this was a function of how the industry had worked before. In the past, editors didn’t have to care as much about making money as they do now. ‘Church and State’, the strict division between editorial staff and the money people, has been dismantled. Her role is a good example of the new hybrid approach. Technically her role is all about content, but she talks to the ad team every day. It used to be enough to wait for the ad team to book the revenue, but times have changed, and good editors are involved in the conversation.

Daniel saw parallels between the situation for publishers and how the ad agency business has changed too. Agencies have launched incredible brands, e.g. air Jordan, but in the past they didn’t get a slice of the real value, and some still have essentially no intellectual property in their creations. They’re really suffering because of that. It’s similar for publishers. They relied on other people with things they wanted to sell advertizing those things on their sites, but times have changed, and now it’s time for them to sell the stuff themselves.

Joe agreed, but wasn’t sure that it was fair to suggest that publishers had sold themselves short — they simply didn’t have to do that much in the past to have very profitable businesses. Crushing it in the industry used to be sitting behind your desk at Time magazine, smoking a few cigarettes, and booking 5 million dollars in ad revenue each year. Now the rules have changed radically without a lot of input from publishers, and they’re trying to play catch-up. There’s no doubt that they’ve been slow to react and that they were resting on their laurels during the rise of digital and social, but that was the way the machine worked. You didn’t need to sell baby books, or have a clothing line, or even a great commercial strategy really.

Leaving legacy

Mads asked to what extent it was an advantage to be digital first and not have to deal with legacy issues?

Joe said that it had been eye-opening for him coming to Popsugar from Time inc. Until the early teens of the 2000s print was still the kingmaker, and for a lot of legacy publishers print is still maybe the biggest revenue driver. It’s far better not to be saddled by a business model that’s increasingly less relevant, but Popsugar is also culturally more nimble and flexible, with a hungrier atmosphere. He’s found it a great experience to transfer to a digital native.

Mads next question was on ethics and the role of media. The ‘Church and State’ separation was traditionally viewed as a good thing, meaning that the editorial team didn’t have to concern themselves, or have their editorial choices influenced, by needing to make money. What’s the downside of the new world?

Carey said it was important to keep an eye on your moral compass, and Bon Appétit say no to a lot of opportunities even though there’s no longer the ‘Church and State’ demarcation. It’s important to stay close to what editors believe in, or you just damage the product. There’s a constant give and take though. Some publishing and media brands don’t do a good job of maintaining the balance; they acquiesce too easily to revenue pressure and lose a lot of brand value that way. You certainly lose when you’re not equal with your commercial partners and you let one side manipulate the conversation.

Short term vs. long term thinking

Mads wondered if it was fair to say that, as the industry evolves, editorial’s role will be to think about long-term revenue and commercial’s role will be to think about the quarter?

Carey was ambivalent, but said that she thought that making editors responsible for revenue complicates things.

Daniel changed the focus of the statement, saying that it was brand equity, not long-term revenue, that they should be focussing on building. That ultimately drives value and gives the sales team something to sell.

Carey talked about some of the risks of being too keen to increase revenue, especially when a partner doesn’t chime with your audience. Bon Appétit’s style is to advocate working with the farmers’ market and your local farmer because that’s what connects with their audience.

Daniel offered that young people don’t mind being marketed to. They don’t mind advertizers, they don’t mind sponsors, but, they don’t want to be marketed crap. There has to be an organic fit between your product and the partner.

Helping brands make their mark

Mads suggested that it’s actually in the brand’s interest to challenge advertizers — if you challenge them and make them work in line with your brand’s authentic character then advertizers also get the most value from the partnership.

Joe said that Popsugar tackle this question a lot in their content studio. When a brand buys a big native or branded content package, they need to buy into the vision of the team and rely on them to come up with a really strong idea and creative that they know is going to resonate with the audience. They need to trust that the team know how to communicate with Popsugar’s audience on social and their own site.

Brands often have a strong idea of what they want to do, and it’s a delicate dance as Popsugar are ultimately the ones who know how to connect with their audience. The best relationships are the ones where clients recognise that and lean into the authority of Popsugar. The importance of getting that conversation right is reflected in the metric of ‘returning brands’, which is really important for The Bakery.

Mads asked about demonstrating success in branded content, and what metrics do the panellists show to brands to justify the spend?

Joe said that Popsugar we show partners engagement metrics like video views and time spent with content. As he’d mentioned, the leading metric for themselves is returning brands.

Daniel said that Northside are very focussed on live events, even though Brooklyn magazine is the tentpole for the business, so branded is less of a focus for them. Regarding event spend by partners, In the past events have been measured anecdotally — if the CEO’s 15 year old kid said it was awesome they’ll come back and sponsor again next year. Now they’re hearing “you’re on brand, you’re on message, but we need to measure ROI”. If they’re not driving value to sponsors in a measurable way then they don’t expect them to come back.

Carey said that if the point is to integrate branded content with editorial, then it can’t ever come across in a way that brings advertizing to mind. At Bon Appétit they’re always concentrating on aligning branded content with the editorial packages they’re most excited about.

Changing channels

An audience member asked the panel about how they chose which social channels to concentrate on.

Carey suggested choosing a couple of key platforms to concentrate on: e.g. Bon Appétit are not on Snapchat, they don’t have resources to do everything really well, and that will be true for most businesses. Choose the ones that really identify with your values and go all in.

Joe also emphasized being strategic. Pick a lane and build up brand equity. Popsugar started as pop culture and entertainment, and spent a few years building credibility there before expanding into general lifestyle play. Young brands can get a lot from working with a really well-thought-through strategic partner strategy. They can distribute your content, swap Facebook stories etc. It helps to get your brand and name out there, and legacy brands who are often less adept at these channels can be very willing to partner. Popsugar now have a very big partnership team, and 150 partners in their network. They’re constantly talking to them and swapping stories. This is a great example of a guerrilla tactic to tap into audiences that already exist.

Another audience member questioned the upside of that approach. They had worked with Business Insider and ended up getting only 9,000 unique visits when an article that they shared with BI got 900,000.

Carey’s advice was that you have to expect that you might have some key partnerships, but a lot won’t work. Bon Appétit used to do a lot of social shares featuring partners, but they’ve since scaled back. If you’re not careful then other people get the SEO benefit and you get nothing. It’s partly a process of trial and error, and if you’re serious about it then you should keep trying. Maybe 1/5 does work.

Another audience question was about the split between desktop and mobile. Carey said that their split was about 60/40 mobile, and unsurprizingly a lot more mobile is coming through Instagram, although it’s still far from the majority. She thinks should be thinking about what they can do tech and product wise to support mobile visitors. The role that AMP plays in that isn’t clear — it seems to be a bit up and down. She doesn’t like the way the AMP pages look, and the industry seems to blow hot and cold on it. It’s also currently not very clear how AMP is affecting monetization.

Subscribing to new ideas?

Mads asked Carey about subscription, which has been one of the bigger trends in the shifting publishing and media business model landscape. She said that subscription is not really part of their revenue. Mads suggested that e.g. monthly recipe packages, or some food-based variant on the Michelle Kwan samples box model could resonate with their audience? Did the panel see growth here?

Carey said that they had felt like there are so many recipes freely available on the internet that a paywall wouldn’t work… However the New York Times did put a paywall around their cooking site recently, and now have 100,000 paying subscribers, so there was clearly some room for this approach.

Joe said that Popsugar’s approach to subscription was to base it around a higher level of service. They don’t want to put the main site behind a paywall and take away things they’ve been giving to their audience for free. Advertizing still makes them a lot of money, so there’s no immediate reason to throw up a paywall in any case. For a brand like Popsugar the main opportunity for paywalled content is specific products where it could work, like a fitness video package they’re working on.

As a final thought, Daniel remarked that he wasn’t that fluent in the subject, but he saw blockchain really changing things and allowing much more community stakeholding and ownership of entities. He wasn’t that thrilled about the current media landscape, where media properties largely owned by the ultra-rich. Blockchain is very new technology, and most people hear about it in the form of crypto currency, but he’d love to see its capabilities being used to make membership and e.g. micropayments an easier business model for publishing and media.

That’s all from this edition of the Future of Media and Publishing from New York: check out our speaker Guy LeCharles Gonzalez on Enthusiast Media here, and Part I of the panel discussion here. If you’d like to join next time then the link to the meetup group can be found here, and we hope that you’ve gained some interesting insights!

Bibblio boosts engagement and revenue by suggesting the best content to your users from across your site. Visit us or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Originally published at www.bibblio.org.

Diversification in Digital Media and Publishing: Part II was originally published in The Graph on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Where are forward thinking publishers looking for sustainable audience growth and revenue?

On 20 September, Bibblio and our friends at Sovrn brought the Future of Media and Publishing meetup back to New York City, getting together a group of future-oriented publishers to discuss how the industry is changing and what they’re doing to adapt. We covered so much ground that we split the write-up of the evening into three parts. The first section features our speaker, Guy LeCharles Gonzalez (Publisher at Writer’s Digest and Director of marketing at F+W Media). Now we have the panel, featuring Carey Polis (Digital Director from Bon Appetit), Joe LaFalce (VP, Business Development at POPSUGAR) and Daniel Stedman (CEO & Co-Founder of Brooklyn Magazine and Northside Media). Enjoy Part I!

Search, social, or somewhere else?

Mads introduced the theme of the evening, which was approaches and strategies for diversifying audience and revenue. The opening question was what does traffic composition look like for each of the panellists right now?

Carey said that search is currently more than 50% of their traffic, social is about 20% (down from 30–40% a couple of years ago), the newsletter is 10/15% and ‘other’ makes up the rest. She’s pretty happy with the current mix — it’s search heavy, but that reflects the nature of Bon Appétit’s audience.

Daniel said that the traffic figures for the Northside media properties are pretty small, and diversification for them is primarily about their different sister projects. Northside’s story started with just the L Magazine, which ran for 12 years, and now the business has branched out to other sites, live events and they’ve also created a content studio (“every media company has one now”, Daniel quipped). Diversification became a necessity for them when the print event listings business collapsed, which is a familiar story to many publishers.

Although live events anchor the business these days, you couldn’t just take the digital offering away and not see a significant impact — it’s the marriage between content and live events that creates the best results. This was something that we’d heard back in the UK as well at the State of Digital Media and Publishing from Linda Blank at SUITCASE Media.

Joe said that, like Bon Appétit, the majority of Popsugar’s traffic comes from search and social, and another big source for them is strategic partners who feature their content. Joe certainly wants to drive traffic to the site so ad-teams can generate sales, but he’s also looking to build specific communities on social platforms, and they’ve invested heavily in these. The nature of the content that they put out on those platforms is very important, as it defines what the audience is going to be. YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat: each platform needs a slightly different approach to make sure that they connect with the audience. It’s really important to Popsugar that they build trust with these communities.

Is Facebook your friend?

In a conversation about traffic, Mads inevitably brought up the implosion in Facebook referrals since the algorithm change earlier this year. It’s taken down a number of businesses who built their business model solely on Facebook traffic, the latest being Unilad. He added that it was now common in the VC world for investors to be wary of media businesses; many had boasted of impressive traffic and visitor metrics (perhaps too impressive…) but had then been unable to monetize those audiences. How do you make money from social communities?

Joe said that Popsugar has been relatively lucky, and was still getting healthy traffic from social: they have seen volatility, but not really a decline. He put this down to the high quality content that they produce and the strong relationship that they have with their community. The key is figuring out how to cultivate trust on the platforms and then how to sustain relationships. Popsugar has managed that, and the result is social visitors clicking through to the site a lot. That leads to monetization.

Carey said, perhaps surprisingly, that the Facebook algorithm change had actually been positive for Bon Appétit. It had certainly led to volatility in social traffic, yes, but realising that it was a mistake to rely on Facebook had given them the freedom to return to prioritizing content quality. Simply trying to acquire (often low-quality) volume had stopped being the priority. As traffic numbers fell they began to prioritize other metrics like engagement, and that has led to changing the way they look at their audience, in a positive way. Of course ‘engagement’ is harder to measure numerically, but using it as the north star has really improved brand visibility and has had very positive effects: traffic is up significantly year-on-year.

The shift means that they now care so much more about editorial content strategy, and Carey said that that can be seen in the growing strength of their writing, visuals and brand identity. They get to prioritize the quality of what appears on the website above everything else. All in all, it’s a great time to be a content creator.

Daniel said that Brooklyn Magazine and The L never reached traffic numbers where programmatic advertising was meaningful at all, so volume was perhaps less crucial to them. They have tried different advertizing tools, but never at the scale. In one sense they missed the boat, but in another it meant that they always got to focus on making quality content.

God is a metric

Connecting with the talk about the changing approach to measuring success, Mads asked each of the panellists what their “god metric” was — what you’d be thinking about if you woke up and checked your phone at 3am…

Joe said that, for him, the key metric is returning visits as a percentage of total traffic. A high proportion of returning traffic shows him that they’re doing a good job of building trust and establishing a strong bond with their target community.

Daniel said that Northside wasn’t at the scale where returning visitors is a particularly meaningful metric. He’s more concerned about in-visit engagement, measured in engaged minutes, a metric which he’s discovered during the last year.

Carey said that the way they measure engagement is the number of ‘loyal visitors’, which to them means somebody who makes at least four visits to the site a month.

Turning loyalty into gold

With the theme of valuing engaged and returning visitors, Mads asked how you turn that loyalty into revenue.

Carey said that video has led to the biggest increase in revenue for them. It’s now a significant part of their overall revenue, and even two years ago it would have been a very small part. A lot of this money is coming from YouTube, and working with sponsors making white-labelled content. Examples of their video products are the 4+1 package, which consists of four editorial episodes and then one branded episode, or a branded series.

Adjusting to video had been a learning process — they didn’t know a lot about YouTube strategy, and worked with video people at Condé Nast to create one. One thing that they learnt is that they have a lot of editors who are great on camera. This only came to light when they were screen-tested. In response to this they’re Investing in editors and changing priorities, for instance the ‘test kitchen’ is now all on camera which wasn’t the case. They had 1 million subscribers three or four months ago, and they’re now at well over 2 million, so there’s huge growth. Operational changes have also been necessary to allow for this success. One thing Carey noted about this is that at legacy publishers people can get very used to “this is my lane”, so it’s important to be flexible and try to get out of that mindset.

A question was asked about Bon Appétit’s video strategy on YouTube: how are they managing content and output — is it part of a set strategy or is it left to the editors who are becoming influencers in their own right?

Carey said that they’ve had a lot of conversations about this in the company. Editors want to be careful with brands they represent, as it’s very personal, and they’re quite sensitive about it. What gets worked on is primarily driven by the partners coming in who want to collaborate with Bon Appétit. Then there’s usually a conversation about what the brand wants to do, and then they work out which particular editors profile it fits with.

Daniel said that 50% of Northside’s income comes from live experiences, so social revenue etc. wasn’t something that he thought about a lot. Diversification of revenue had actually posed a bit of a problem for them. At one stage they reached a point where they had too many revenue channels for a relatively small company. The content studio was growing very quickly but wasn’t creating value for the Northside festival, then the festival was driving a lot of visits to Brooklyn magazine but sponsorship packages didn’t reflect that. One solution to that was to try and attribute revenues better and annualize them, but it’s not an easy balance for them to strike.

Joe said that the majority of advertising revenue for Popsugar comes from their branded and native content studio — The Bakery — whose content is then distributed across social. Display revenue is declining for them, which isn’t a surprise. It’s still tough, as it’s high margin, but on the other hand it doesn’t drive the repeat business that the branded content studio does drive and which leads to stable growth.

New horizons for monetization

Mads asked the panel what is the true role of content in modern digital publishing and media businesses? He mentioned the famous diagram which Walt Disney drew to explain how his business worked: the feature film is in the middle of the page, and arrows lead from it in all directions illustrating how it supports and enables many other revenue streams, like the parks and merchandize. Mads was curious about what that map would like for each of the panellists? Does content work for them they way it does for Disney?

Joe agreed that content had to be thought of as an enabler of other revenue streams, and that he’d even made a version of that graphic before himself.

In that spirit, Popsugar has leant into lots of new business lines this year. They’ve launched a branded ready to wear line with Kohl’s which is in 1000 stores across the country, and a beauty line with Ulta, leveraging the power of the brand. This is why trust and connection with the brand is so important — Popsugar can take 30,000,000 people to these new products. They’ve created experiential business lines too, e.g. Play/Ground, celebrating the playful and grounded side of people, which was visited by 10,000 women over two days. They’ve also launched a new content development studio, Toy Rocket, which is working directly with studios and television networks to incubate and produce long-form content and pitch to producers and studios.

Diversification is going well, but there are still parts of the puzzle they need to figure out, because it’s a key way to de-risk the ups and downs of an unpredictable ad market. This is really important for resilience, not to mention that they’ve got really strong brand equity and a loyal audience which they wouldn’t be monetizing properly if they were only serving ads.

Carey said that one example of where content enabled other monetization was with affiliate revenue, and that in-article affiliate promotions were something that Bon Appétit are doing a lot now. They hired an e-commerce editor last year, which she admitted was quite late to the party, but they’d had a lot of success with the concept as it works very well for cooking. This is because of the combination of the opportunity to recommend products organically in content, and the trust that their audience have in them. They always disclose affiliate products, and their editors are experts who don’t recommend anything that they don’t believe in, which is key to maintaining that trust. As an example of how successful it can be, an affiliate sold 4,000 towels on Amazon a few weeks ago after being featured on Bon Appétit.

Mads suggested that, as a brand, you need to start from the position of having demonstrated the expertise before you can tie that in to e-commerce. Carey agreed, and said that part of the overall strategy is to be very driven by particular expert personalities. Their editors are well known and are big on Instagram and feature in YouTube videos. They’re also careful in what they endorse — you won’t find any roundups of the ’15 best examples’ of something. It’s all personally promoting individual products: “this is the gravy boat we’re really into right now”.

That’s all for Part I — as you can see, there was a lot of really great in depth discussion on some key topics. Keep any eye out for Part II, which we’ll be releasing next week.

Bibblio boosts engagement and revenue by suggesting the best content to your users from across your site. Visit us or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Originally published at www.bibblio.org.

Diversification in Digital Media and Publishing: Part I was originally published in The Graph on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Introducing a new mental model to help publishers think about audience strategy

On 20 September Bibblio and our friends at Sovrn brought the Future of Media and Publishing meetup back to New York City, getting together a group of future-oriented publishers to discuss how the industry is changing and what they’re doing to adapt. We covered so much ground that we’ve split the write-up of the evening into three parts: the first part features our speaker, Guy LeCharles Gonzalez (Publisher at Writer’s Digest and Director of marketing at F+W Media), and the other parts will cover the panel, which featured Carey Polis (Digital Director from Bon Appetit), Joe LaFalce (VP, Business Development at POPSUGAR) and Daniel Stedman (CEO & Co-Founder of Brooklyn Magazine and Northside Media).

Enthusiast Media?

Guy’s talk introduced the audience to the idea of ‘Enthusiast Media’: what defines it, how the business model works, and what you need to do if you want to leverage the model in your own business. First of all, it’s not big scale consumer media, which to Guy is the least interesting part of the media business anyway. It’s so dependent on ads, you fundamentally don’t control your own fate.

So, what is an Enthusiast Media company?

It’s a truly diversified company that brings a specific community together across multiple platforms and connects them to the information, inspiration, and resources they need to pursue their shared interests and individual goals.

Four key traits define an Enthusiast Media business:

• Creates and publishes inspirational or instructional content in multiple formats across multiple platforms
• Engages and nurtures enthusiasts through lead journeys, content and other experiences
• Connects enthusiasts to each other, and potentially third parties (advertisers are still a part of this space)
• Produces relevant products and services to serve the enthusiasts needs and interests, a notable percentage of which they pay for — this is what separates Enthusiast Media from general consumer and some B2B

A lot of B2B publishers also share some of these characteristics.

Guy offered some examples of Enthusiast Media. Red Bull is a particularly interesting case study. The core brand is the drink, but group contains various media properties as well, and they’re each treated as a stand-alone business — they have to be profitable on their own. This obviously isn’t the way that brands usually approach content marketing, but Red Bull have such a strong brand and are so good at serving their community that the approach works for them.

Another example is Skift, who have carved out a unique space in travel, providing global travel industry intelligence. A good example of a media company doing something similar in another vertical would be The Business of Fashion. Ascribing to Guy’s model of an Enthusiast Media company, Skift monetise in a number of different ways. As well as traditional advertising, they have subscription products and content marketing / native advertising, e.g. partner research pieces.

It almost goes without saying that for a company to be Enthusiast Media its content has to be valuable and not commoditised.

Because of the way Enthusiast Media concentrates on the valued community members, not volume, their KPIs are different to normal media — no vanity metrics like page views here. What matters to an Enthusiast Media company is the depth of engagement and how to nurture people through the journey that leads to revenue.

Enthusiasts are different

It’s important to understand that Enthusiasts are a subset of general consumers, and that’s true even within a vertical. People make the mistake of thinking that everyone in a vertical has a monolithic set of interests, and that you can just produce a load of vaguely targeted content and get a lot of traction. That’s not so.

Anyone who thought they could just throw up a niche publishing company off the back of the Facebook “magic button” a few years ago isn’t in business anymore. They didn’t really have a plan, they had access to an audience they didn’t own. Enthusiast Media own their audience and they know them inside out — you can’t produce content and assume it will resonate with everyone in a broad demographic.

Guy illustrated this point by describing how they work at Writers’ Digest. They recognise that writers aren’t all the same, and they have four primary categories of reader: the Fiction Writer, the Memoirist, the Freelance Writer and the Screenwriter. Each category has some overlap and commonalities, but there are important variations, and they target them with different content. Even writing students aren’t all the same — they study different things!

One of Writer’s Digest’s primary ‘competitors’ is Poets & Writers. Poets & Writers targets a specific subset of writers of literary fiction and poetry. Because of their focus on those two categories, they serve that audience in ways Writer’s Digest can’t, engaging with them from a different perspective. But, you can’t make that strategic decision if you don’t know your overall audience really well.

In many ways, when you’re an Enthusiast Media company your main competitor is your own audience — they want to talk to and learn from each other as much as you. Advertising partners are also your competitors, since in a specialised space many are also looking to develop close relationships with their customers, often based on content. How do you reach enthusiasts and engage them when there’s so much happening around them? The only way is to really understand the channels they engage with and what kind of content you need to push to earn their attention.

Enthusiast Media in metrics

Enthusiast Media is not primarily driven by advertising. This means that you can’t have vanity metric KPIs. Some more useful metrics that Guy suggested are new visitors via search & social, pages/session, email acquisition and email open rates and CTRs. Another useful deep metric that we’ve come across recently, used by Enthusiast Media like Physics World, is returning visitors.

Guy also made a subtle point about the way we talk about measuring those metrics and what we do with the information we gather. Too many people talk about being “data-driven”. Don’t let data drive you, he said — data should inform you. Data, on its own, is useless if you don’t have a plan and a way to use it to make decisions that generate revenue. There’s a lot of technology now to help publishers measure and collect data, but that technology only has value if you’re using the data well.

A little while ago the internet shifted from being a way to connect people to being a way to sell people things. That was maybe inevitable, but a lot of people are uncomfortable with that (with good reason, but we won’t go into that here). The best media brands recognise that: they aren’t always trying to sell sell sell sell sell. If you serve your community well and you have a good product then the sales will come naturally.

When it comes to Enthusiast Media companies working with advertisers, Guy says that the secret sauce is finding an advertising partner that really cares about your audience and treats them respectfully. The right partner helps you produce great content and material that teaches your audience.

Guy’s talk introduced a really interesting new mental model for the audience to think about the vertical and niche publishing space with. I’m sure more than a few people will be integrating it into their strategy and how they think about their business in the future. Following Guy was our panel discussion, which we’ll cover in the next instalments from FOMP NYC.

Bibblio boosts engagement and revenue by suggesting the best content to your users from across your site. Visit us or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Originally published at www.bibblio.org.

Takeaways from the panel at the first State of Media and Digital Publishing event in London

On Tuesday 11th September, a group of London’s forward thinking digital publishers gathered at WeWork Shoreditch for the first State of Media and Digital Publishing event. SMDP (for short) is a new event dedicated to insights and actionable advice on how to thrive in the industry.

With two knowledgeable speakers and a panel of industry innovators, we were well set up for a great evening. We want everyone to be able to benefit from what we learnt, so we’re publishing two in-depth articles about the event, and this is the second, reporting the key points from our panel discussion. You can find the first here.

How to measure up

Alex Price, founder and Managing Director of agency 93digital, moderated our panel and kicked off by asking whether there’s a single metric that digital publishers should be concentrating on that defines success.

Mads Holmen, founder and CEO of Bibblio, suggested that the key for publishers, even if it can seem hard with quarter targets coming up, is thinking longer-term. You need to survive, but you’re not going to thrive unless you build a brand. He said that publishers need to try to move from measuring clicks to deeper metrics like time spent, and really get a grip on whether audiences are happy with the experience.

Carl Hazeley, VP Content at Finimize, said that the metric that really mattered to them was Net Promoter Score — everything boils down to that. For Carl, this is the real measure of who will recommend and push your product, and Finimize can see that reflected in the growth of their newsletter and app.

Dens Milne, Senior Product Manager from Physics World, chose returning visitor rate as their most important metric. To her that’s the best measure of loyal users. Returning users stay longer and are more committed to your product.

Reflecting on Mads’ response, Alex asked how publishers and their employees can actually break free from the pressure of the next performance review?

Mads admitted that this is the million dollar question for publishers, and he didn’t have a simple answer. He suggested that publishers have to live their lives as much in the future as they can without jeopardising today. In any case, whatever your shorter-term concerns, it helps to have one metric that tells you the ‘truth’ about the long-term success of your business, even if it’s not the one that’s managed. NPS, as Carl suggested, could be the right one. Alex wanted to know if commercial leads will actually accept NPS as a relevant metric, and Carl said that this was certainly true at Finimize.

Changing channels?

The question then shifted to acquisition channels. Dens said that, for Physics world, organic search and direct visits were responsible for the vast majority of visits. This is pretty unusual, and she conceded that Physics World isn’t your average publisher because of the longevity and niche nature of their content. This means that Facebook’s algorithm changes haven’t really affected them. Although their social numbers dipped at the beginning of the year, they’ve since come back up, and social referrals have only ever accounted for about 4% of their traffic.

Alice Revel, founder and Editor of book box subscription service Reading in Heels and Running in Heels, said that their most important channel was also organic. In their case though it’s in the form of word-of-mouth, often on social platforms. So far, they’ve actually done no paid digital marketing: growth has all come from consumer advocates. Facebook has also been a useful channel for them. Since the deprioritization of content following the algorithm change they’ve created a Facebook group which has been successful in attracting engaged members.

Carl said that at Finimize, whose users don’t pay for access, the main acquisition channel is referral through sharing. This mainly happens on Twitter and Instagram though — Facebook is actually not a large part of their traffic.

It was an interesting part of the discussion, and highlighted that the different business models within publishing require diverse approaches to audience acquisition. Not all content is the same. It was also interesting to hear that nobody was relying significantly on Facebook.

New horizons?

Mads agreed with Dens that returning visitors are the most valuable, and publishers should try to avoid too much new traffic. Think of new visitors as being like tourists: if you’re not careful then what’s cool can change very quickly and then tourists all go to a different part of town. Although Google seems to be a more stable source of traffic than Facebook, the fact that around 80% of all traffic to publishers is coming from these sources is a strategic danger sign. One solution to that is to look to genuinely new channels to diversify acquisition.

One channel that publishers seem to be ignoring completely is… each other. Faced with the threats in the ecosystem, Mads suggested that publishers need to see other publishers as friends not enemies. YouTube stars have known for a long time that cross-pollination of audiences from similar channels is good for everyone, and they’re happy to feature one another on their channels. They’ve realised that they’re rarely directly competing, even with channels with similar content. They’re competing with other distractions and someone logging off because they can’t find anything else that’s interesting.

The next question Alex asked was about how to get the balance right with the different commercial models available to digital publishers. Alice said that this didn’t really apply to her, since book boxes were her main product, but despite the struggles of many physical publishers, they’d had great engagement offline. The interesting challenge for them was actually making people put their phones away! She pointed out that there are now just so many content sites out there, and as digital sources increase the meaning and relevance of most of them decreases. This echoed Linda’s earlier comments on the importance of differentiation. It’s getting harder, and more important, to stand out.

Dens noted that Physics World have their physical magazine, so as well as advertising they also use a subscription model. Advertising means that volume is important to them and that affects priorities, but it also means that there’s a strong incentive to use data to make ads more relevant and to target people with products in a more tailored way.

Mads zoomed the discussion right out, mentioning a famous illustration by Walt Disney showing while films were core to the business, their significance wasn’t the just income they generated, it was the way that they supported a whole range of other money-making activities, like merchandising, theme parks and games.

Publishing needs to focus on content in the same way as Walt Disney focussed on films, as the enabler of a whole range of other ways of making money. This was something that Linda Blank, from SUITCASE Media, had talked about earlier in the evening, with a particular emphasis on print. Every business is different though, and the key thing is getting the right mix, as Alex had alluded to. The Daily Mail Online is primarily a high volume advertising play, but they’re now doing a lot of affiliate sales. Dennis Publishing now make a huge amount of their revenue, forecast to be 45% in 2018, by promoting their second-hand car sales business, Buyacar, on the three biggest auto magazines in the UK, which they own.

Mads maintained that publishers haven’t been creating enough value from the audiences they’ve made, but they’re getting better at it. More needs to be done though. Why was he seeing adverts on BBC good food for shoes at 6:45 on a Friday evening? For all the talk about clever technology, the ad industry is still pretty bad at delivering value to audiences. Publishers should think about how they can own the relationship rather than outsourcing it: they know their audiences a lot better than the ad networks do, and they should use that.

Carl mentioned ASOS.com in this context. One of the reasons they were so successful in their space was because they understood their audience. When it came to social channels, they were sharing anything they thought was cool, not just their own clothes. This gave them authenticity, because their followers saw quality contributions that they wanted to see, not just what ASOS wanted them to buy. Mads added that ASOS also created their own team of influencers in house as part of this strategy.

Trust issues?

Alice commented that she sees a lot of mistrust around influencer marketing these days: consumers are realising that a lot of apparently organic coverage is actually bought. In particular there’s a lot of suspicion around the affiliate model, and brands need to rethink how they do that. She said that the solution was prioritising authenticity — the right partnerships with the right brands — and being transparent when commercial relationships exist. Don’t try to pass things off as organic when they’re not. People know.

Mads said that he had thought about this, and that there actually seems to be a split going on here. One part of society is now very savvy and demands authenticity, and they’re a very valuable market, but with the rest of consumers, the people peddling dodgy endorsements are winning. He had read recently that Instagram influencer / YouTuber is now the top job choice of a staggering number of American teens in recent surveys, and the vast majority of paid-for posts on Instagram don’t actually have #ad on them. He suggested that we’re seeing this general split across the board — in politics too — and the scary thing is there seems to be the commoditization of people’s attention.

Considering this, Dens said that the Physics World audience are firmly in the first camp Mads mentioned, because of the rationalist, evidence-based tendency of people interested in their content. Physics World is very careful to badge native content clearly, and they don’t use Instagram. Alice said that she didn’t use Instagram either, and that a full page spread in Vogue was by far the most effective campaign they’d ever run.

Mads returned to the trust problems that Alice was describing in digital, suggesting that they can actually be brand building opportunities for companies. To illustrate this he mentioned the well-known story in Denmark of McKinsey and the Danish equivalent of the BBC. McKinsey realised that they couldn’t actually do the digital transformation job that they’d been hired for, and instead of taking the money and keeping quiet, they owned up and forfeited the contract. That honesty is now their calling card. Similarly, publishers can really distinguish themselves by championing transparency in their dealings with advertisers and their audiences.

Mads finished by saying that above all, publishers need to recognise that they live in the attention economy. The average American sleeps one hour less than they used to, and that time is often being replaced by media. The age of Trump has exposed the fact that a lot of the media and tech companies we used to admire have been abusing our trust. Fundamentally, their business models mean that they need to consume more and more of our time and data to keep growing their profits. That’s a problem that’s increasingly being recognised. Digital publishers can’t compete and shouldn’t try to become more like them — the future lies in quality content and audience trust.

Bibblio boosts engagement and revenue by suggesting the best content to your users from across your site. Visit us or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Originally published at www.bibblio.org.

Metrics, channels, innovation and trust: what’s on the minds of digital publishers was originally published in The Graph on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For niche, quality digital publications, print and offline could be essential parts of your strategy

On Tuesday 11th September a group of London’s forward thinking digital publishers gathered at WeWork Shoreditch for the first State of Media and Digital Publishing event. SMDP (for short) is a new event dedicated to insights and actionable advice on how to thrive in the business.

With two knowledgeable speakers and a panel of industry innovators, we were well set up for a great evening. We want everyone to be able to benefit from what we learnt, so we’re publishing two in-depth articles about the event, starting with the talks from our speakers. Both speakers were from digital publishers who still have print publications and whose success rests on being thought leaders in a particular vertical. Is there a connection?

Physics World makes a big bang with its new site

Dens Milne is Senior Product Manager at Physics World, a monthly print publication with a popular website. She started by telling the crowd about how the company had found itself with a problem. They had great content, 20 years and 95,000 articles of it, but they hadn’t updated their website for a long time. Having an old system was creating a real cost: they didn’t have the tools to make the most of both that content and also the goodwill they’d built up with their audience. Things were disjointed and hard to manage. This meant they were missing out on opportunities to grow users and advertising revenue. So, they needed to build a new website, and brought in London WordPress agency 93Digital to do the job.

Just how much they were missing out became clear when the job was done: the website is outperforming all of its competitors and has seen strong growth in registered users, with 60% of them are opting in to receiving advertising messages. 40% of users have also rated the new website a 9 or 10 out of 10. What did they do to get these kinds of results?

One thing that Dens felt really helped was paying close attention to the information architecture: every piece of content is now defined and tagged with article type and subject. This was, unsurprisingly, a lot of work. They had to change all of the content URLs whilst making sure that that wasn’t going to impact organic search. There’s been a big upside though: people can now navigate by these labels, and they can also be used to target advertising.

The site also now has a totally editable framework, drag and drop page creation with modular components and WYSIWIG creation of articles, so it’s much easier to change the site and publish new content. Previously developers had to be involved in all of these processes. What’s more, managing native and programmatic advertising has become much simpler.

One example of the benefits of the new site was when an article on black holes, published a decade earlier, received 10x the number of page views in one week than it had in the previous 3 years after black holes had featured in the news. This was down to how much easier it was after the rebuild for visitors to find relevant, evergreen content, which Physics World has a lot of because of the nature of the subject matter.

Dens had some takeaways for anyone also thinking about revamping their website:

• Think carefully about how to organise your content in a way that’s relevant to your users (and advertisers) — content is still very much king.
• Every action you take needs to be geared towards the relevant KPIs — people don’t give you a lot of money to not move the business forward, and…
• Be brave and don’t worry about getting a bit of negative feedback. Some people just hate change.

The results show that the redesign has generated a lot of real value for Physics World.

Unpacking SUITCASE’s success

Up next was Linda Blank, Commercial Director of SUITCASE Media Group, an award-winning travel media company with, again, a quarterly print magazine as well as a digital offering. She started on a positive note, pushing back against the prophets of doom: print isn’t dead and publishing isn’t dying. Digital publishing is predicted to grow by 12% by 2020. That’s actually faster than the travel industry that SUITCASE operates within. And, although overall print sales for magazines are declining, independent magazine subscriptions grew by 78% in revenue in 2016. There seems to be a great future for high-quality, well-targeted content.

That’s certainly the view that SUITCASE take — they’re aimed at an aspirational, experiential traveller with a “millennial mindset”. This audience doesn’t want a run-of-the-mill experience at another Four Seasons. Catering for them means having differentiated content with a perspective that can’t just be found anywhere. That’s true for most audiences these days: it’s often pretty clear why a publisher is struggling when you read its output. If you could read it in 10 other places, why would people pay to read it or advertisers pay premium rates to feature alongside it?

Ads are going native

Great content still needs to be monetised though, and how advertisers spend money is evolving. Linda pointed everyone’s attention in the direction of native advertising and content marketing. This is now a huge industry, she said, projected to be worth $300 billion in 2019. Publishers can work with that.

Not only do SUITCASE do native advertising on the site, they’ve also launched their own content marketing agency. This was actually created in response to client demand. Brands were already coming to them and asking “how should we decide on our social strategy” and “how should we write content”. Then, an advertising client said they needed to rebrand themselves and asked SUITCASE to do it for them. They wanted a new tone of voice, and SUITCASE’s output resonated with them. This all flowed directly from being an expert and thought leader in travel.

Content marketing is also beginning to blend with e-commerce — a great example is Hodinkee, whose luxury watch blog content has also become a way to reach customers for those watches. Linda said that this is a very cost effective way to find new customers and retain them.

Offline can’t be an afterthought

Linda was also adamant that offline is not just a channel for diversifying revenue, it’s an essential part of their business. Print is a luxury product, and that’s what makes it a precise fit with their online audience. SUITCASE Media actually wouldn’t exist without SUITCASE Magazine’s role in building the audience, and the magazine buffs the thought-leadership credentials that SUITCASE Media needs. It’s a business card for the agency side of the business, and one that generates income: you can bring it to meetings, leave it when you go, and leave a powerful example of your expertise with a potential customer.

Offline also isn’t just the magazine — SUITCASE recently did a pop-up bar with Horizn Studios, and partnered with Muji to design their new store windows. In another indication of the power of becoming a thought leader, Muji actually approached them, even though SUITCASE had no history with this sort of project. It’s not a coincidence that Muji roughly translates to ‘quality’ in Japanese, and they loved SUITCASE’s approach to travel.

The idea behind all of these projects was to create valuable interactions with users, which Linda said is the secret to growing a loyal audience and creating a great community. If you can do that, it becomes a lot easier to monetise users. Asked about how to do that, Linda responded that one of the keys for them is rewarding highly engaged readers, e.g. with events, competitions and providing free products from partners. They also really listen to feedback and comments from members of their community, SUITCASE Club, and act on them, e.g. by updating reviews when members give them new information.

Currently SUITCASE are focussing on trying to fix the customer experience of travel, which is very disjointed. There are lots of different sites for research, booking etc., and it’s a chore for travellers. SUITCASE have developed the ‘travel planner’ which allows you to explore different cities, populated with recommendations, and make your own itinerary — basically a personal travel guide that you’ve created yourself. Check it out here.

Linda summed everything up by saying:

It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that both Physics World and SUITCASE have successful print offerings. It might not be crucial for generalised content, but in a well-defined vertical where your specialist content is valuable to a loyal community, print might even have an increasing role — both as a luxury object for readers and as a ‘business card’ for commercial clients.

We hope this was a useful insight into the approaches behind the success of two great digital publishers — stay tuned for the next instalment from SMDP, featuring the panel discussion.

Bibblio boosts engagement and revenue by suggesting the best content to your users from across your site. Visit us or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Originally published at www.bibblio.org.

Does Digital Publishing Success Mean Going Analogue? was originally published in The Graph on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re more likely to click on an image than plain text, so make sure your related posts pack a visual punch.

Bibblio’s Related Posts for WordPress has become the much-discussed new kid on the block of content recommendation plugins. Its use of AI to constantly monitor and select the most appropriate content suggestions to appear below site posts has set it apart from the raft of predecessors that have saturated this increasingly important area of audience retention.

Alongside the AI, Bibblio’s plugin boasts a slickly-designed, customizable module, with many controls to determine how it looks and behaves. Literally hundreds of combinations are available to the WordPresser, from the layout of the recommendation tiles, to the text’s font and size, to the interaction effects.

What makes the most impact though are the images used on the module. These are vital in attracting the reader’s eye, encouraging them to discover more and stay on your site.

Here are 4 tips to make the most of imagery on your Bibblio Related Posts plugin…

1. Be sure your images are set as Featured Images

Featured Images are a standardized way to assign a primary visual element to your posts. The majority of WordPress templates support Featured Images (also known as post thumbnails) which allow third party plugins such as Bibblio’s to use them for other purposes.

If you do not have any images appearing in your Related Posts module, it is possible you aren’t using Featured Images. But fear not, you can use Martin Stehle’s Quick Featured Images plugin to bulk-update your posts with Featured Images. The premium version of Martin’s plugin gives you more control over the operation, with plenty of tools to achieve the best result.

When your posts update with the Featured Image change, the Related Posts plugin will see the update too.

2. Provide alternatives for posts that have no images

You might have posts that don’t have images in them, be they Featured Images or otherwise. This is fair enough — it might be an article that didn’t require illustration, or it might be a post containing embedded video or audio playback objects that were visually impacting enough. This will mean that you’ll see gray tiles representing these posts in the Related Posts module. They will work sure enough but they won’t be very impactful.

A solution to this is to add some generic images to the backgrounds of your Related Posts module tiles. That way, if a Featured Image is missing, the tile will show a default image instead of the gray background.

Say your website follows a football team — you could have a generic image of their stadium, one of the team, one of a close-up of the badge, one of the mascot geeing up the crowds, etc. If the images are ambiguous enough they will probably work with any post subject.

Do this by adding some CSS to either one of your pre-existing stylesheets or by creating a new one. Be sure your stylesheet loads after the Related Posts plugin’s stylesheet (bib-related-content.css) so that it overwrites the plugin’s default class properly.

Choose up to six pictures that you’ve not used as Featured Images before (and don’t plan to in the future!) Choosing six and keeping them ‘reserved’ ensures no image repeats in the same module. Crop these images to a similar ratio to your Featured Images, resizing them to around 500px wide and compressing them so they aren’t too heavy, then save them to your site.

Add the following class for each of your tiles, changing the class number to correspond with each tile (e.g. .bib__tile — 1, .bib__tile — 2 etc.) and the URL to the path for each image, for example:

.bib__tile--1 .bib__link { 
    background-image: url(https://medium.com/'https://images.bibblio.org/bkgds/demos/publishing-virtual.jpg');
}

.bib__tile--2 .bib__link {
    background-image: url(https://medium.com/'https://images.bibblio.org/bkgds/demos/publishing-laptop.jpg');
}

etc.

If you want to put the cherry on top, add the following class to your stylesheet. The black gradient behind the tile titles are darker when there’s a Featured Image and lighter on the gray empty tiles, for better text legibility. This class will ensure the gradient is dark enough for all tiles:

.bib__link .bib__info {
    background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, rgba(0,0,0,0) 0%, rgba(0,0,0,1) 100%);
    background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, rgba(0,0,0,0) 0%,rgba(0,0,0,1) 100%);
    background: linear-gradient(to bottom, rgba(0,0,0,0) 0%,rgba(0,0,0,1) 100%);
    filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#00000000', endColorstr='#000000',GradientType=0 );
}

Save the CSS file and reload a post page that you know to have related post suggestions without images. You should see your new default images displaying in those gaps.

If you’d prefer not to use replacement images but instead would like to change the gray background for a different color, you can do so by ignoring the preceding classes and using the following code in your CSS, replacing the hex code with a color of your choice:

.bib__link {
    background-color: #FF9999;
}

3. Be sure your module shows off your images effectively

For the majority of layouts used on the Related Posts plugin, the module builder allows you to set the ratio of all of the tiles. The choice is 4:3 (a standard landscape postcard-like size), Square (both width and height are equal) and Wide (16:9 widescreen size).

Each of these sizes will influence how your posts’ Featured Images will display in the tiles. For example, if you have widescreen-shaped images and choose Square ratio tiles, the image will display centered in each tile with the left and right edges cropped off the sides. If you have square-shaped images and choose 4:3 ratio tiles, the image will fit in each tile with white space on the left and right side of it. A kind of vertical letter-boxing.

Playing around with these ratios will reveal the best combination. Other factors such as post title length may also influence which ratio works best. For instance, a square ratio allows more text to be displayed, so would suit a site that invariably uses long titles.

Some sites use portrait shaped images (where the width is less than the height), which will create vertical letter-boxing on ratios such as 4:3 and square. This doesn’t look very good, but can be fixed across the module by going to the Modules tab in the Bibblio plugin admin, choosing a module to edit and selecting “Using portrait images” from the Display Options panel. This will assume all images on your site are portrait shaped and will resize the images in each tile to fit correctly, anchoring them to the top of the tile. Very useful if all of your Featured Images are book covers!

4. Be careful your images aren’t blurry

It could be that using a particular module makes your background images appear blurry or low quality. This is because the image might be being stretched to fit the larger area of each tile, and here’s why…

In order to not have the user download high resolution versions of each related post’s Featured Image, the plugin instead selects the “Medium” sized version. This was one of several default sizes saved by WordPress when you first added the image to your post. WordPress creates a medium-sized image by limiting the width or height (whichever is largest) to a maximum of 300 pixels, scaling the image proportionally.

Some of our plugin layouts may have tiles that are wider than 300 pixels in certain instances. The Featured Images are then forced to fit each tile, making them look poor quality.

You can ensure a better image quality for all of your future posts, by going to Settings > Media, changing the Medium size Max Width to 400 and Max Height to 600. Then clicking Save Changes. This will make all newly-created medium-sized images slightly larger, even in portrait orientation.

If you wish to change the “Medium” size of your existing featured images, there are a variety of plugins available to automatically resize them to your desired dimensions. Once complete, you will need to re-import your posts so that Bibblio knows the new image URLs for each. Please get in touch if you would like to clear your account to perform this.

In summary

Play around with the module builder and see what works best for your post images and titles. There will be an ideal layout for you, we’re sure! You can even go further and customize the module as much as you like with your own stylesheets. It’s your site and your plugin, so make it look as though it has always lived there! If you have any questions or feedback, get in touch with Bibblio’s WordPress team.

Also read our Related Posts for WordPress plugin guide.

Bibblio boosts engagement and revenue by suggesting the best content to your users from across your site. Visit us or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Originally published at bibblio.org.